With Prime Minister Netanyahu arriving in Washington this week to meet with President Trump and the press full of headlines about turmoil at the National Security Council, the president faces some big decisions, writes Ira Stoll. The Chinese example is a fine one. Trump’s scuttling of the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade agreement raised concerns that he would ruin relations with America’s Asian friends. But while the foreign policy press had been obsessing over Israeli settlements, Trump has quietly been cultivating Japan, India, and Taiwan, deeply unsettling Communist China.

But it can be hard to tell what’s going on from the sidelines, notes Stoll, because Trump, like his mentor Henry Kissinger, is a practitioner of what diplomats and businessmen call constructive ambiguity and what political philosophers call Straussian esotericism.